Top 10 resources to take your social media marketing strategy to an entirely new level

Social media marketing strategy

Social media is bringing about a massive change in the way brands market themselves on the internet. New platforms have recently emerged and continue to change the way we communicate. These platforms affect on how brands promote their message, and how people respond to them.

While you may be already familiar with some of the top leaders in social media account management like TweetDeck and Hootsuite, there are many other social media marketing tools that can help you take your business to an entirely new level.

Before delving into these tools, let’s take a quick look at a survey on social media conducted by Clutch in 2017 of 350 small businesses spread across the United States to find out the digital marketing trends and objectives for the year.

Here are the findings:

24% of small businesses do not use social media

More than 90% of small businesses that use social media do so on Facebook

Over 50% of businesses plan to increase their investment in YouTube, Instagram and Twitter in 2017

Nearly 41% engage with followers and share their content many times a day

Over 50% of businesses depend on in-house staff for their social media marketing efforts

Clicks to website and audience growth are the most important metrics for small business owners

1. Cyfe

Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard, which makes it super easy to keep an eye on every piece of analytic information about your business. Pre-built widgets gather information from popular services, such as Salesforce and Google.

You can add your own Push API or custom widgets in order to integrate additional data. Built for freelancers, mid size businesses, large enterprises, public administrations, nonprofits and small businesses, the tool tracks brand mention, Facebook demographics and Twitter followers from the social media dashboard.

Visit the startup dashboard to find the number of app downloads, new signups, subscriptions and additional KPIs in real time.

The client dashboard allows you to automate client reporting with social media, advertising data and SEO. Well, that’s not all since you can find a sales dashboard, web analytics dashboard, IT board, project management dashboard and almost every widget that you might eventually need.

In short, Cyfe is a smart tool that allows you to create beautiful reports right from the web. It just has to be connected to other accounts like Adwords, Facebook, etc., or to custom files and csv and it plays pretty good.

Here is a short video on how you can use Cyfe for your social media marketing needs.

2. Buffer

With its simple analytics features and clean interface, Buffer is a popular social media sharing tool that can help you share content across multiple networks and accounts — all from one central dashboard.

It automates the timing of your social media posts and has options for including many social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ among others.

To start using the tool, sign in using any of your social media account, or opt to select a dedicated Buffer account. Once you are logged in, add the other social networks, which you didn’t use during the time of signing up. Create numerous posts enough to populate your social media for an entire week or even more and add them to “Buffer queue.”

The app then selects a time when most retweets and clicks happen, and then posts them for you. Buffer has partnered with a service called Tweroid that peruses your account and recommends the right time for you to post.

Source: PCWorld.com

The real power of Buffer lies in the fact that you can add content to your queue wherever you want on the web. Finally, the tool also supplies you with important information that suggests whether growth is going well or whether you should change your sharing strategy.

Source: Quicksprout.com

3. Curalate

Curalate allows you to monitor, measure and grow the presence of your business on social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram.

Launched in late 2011, roughly 2.6 billion images are shared on Instagram alone every single day by business owners using this powerful tool. It allows you to tell the story of your brand using imagery in order to build brand awareness, drive customer engagement, and finally build strong relationships with your consumers.

Used by small-medium businesses and large enterprises, it applies image recognition algorithms to conversations on social media after which it scours the sites to find what visitors/consumers are saying about your brand using images.

You can immediately see what people are sharing about your brand, push content to a shoppable, customizable image gallery, gather and moderate fan images for user-generated content, and schedule your own pictures for posting on social sites.

4. Social Clout

It can be pretty addictive to share content and gather likes. However, if you really want to have a clear picture on those posts that get maximum engagement, you need to look past vanity metrics and emphasize on the metrics that matter the most.

Built particularly for brands and individuals who want to ensure that they are on track with the content they’re sharing on social sites, Social Clout unearths the demographics with the highest engagement, the platforms that convert the best and the times when they do so.

It also shows you your areas of expertise, which is highly important since you can use that information to confirm that you are on the right track with respect to building your brand around things that are most important to you.

5. Social Rank

It helps agencies, celebrities and brands to understand their social media followers — not only in aggregate as can be seen on most social analytics services, but also on an individual level.

It sorts your followers on the basis of Most Valuable (highest profile followers), Best Followers (the most recently engaged followers with your brand), Most Followed and Most Engaged (frequency of replies, mentions and retweets).

Social Rank allows you to use additional filters in order to discover followers based on geographic locations, activity interests and bio keywords.

6. Feedly

When it comes to ruling the roost in your niche, there’s nothing better than an RSS feed that contains the latest posts from top notch blogs in your industry. After Google Reader closed their doors,Feedly turned out to be the best alternative.

The tool can be used to aid your social media marketing efforts in the following ways:

Share from inside Feedly

As can be seen in the image below, when you hover over a post, you get sharing options for Facebook and Twitter. You can share directly on these sites or choose to them to your Buffer queue after you click a sharing button.

Source: quicksprout.com

Content curation

Since you add only the best sites to your RSS feed, Feedly offers the fastest way to find the greatest and latest content to be shared with your followers.

An interesting part of using the tool effectively is to add top quality sites to your feed since if you start using poor quality sites, you’ll have to go through the bad content in order to find good, shareable content.

7. Babbly

Babbly is a social sharing tool that pushes your content so that it reaches viral status. You can simply post a great link to your content to the Babbly community and see it go viral. Babbly is very simple to use.

You’re aware the when a piece of content goes viral, the chances of people sharing and linking to it increases as well. Consequently, this can lead to increase search visibility. Of course, there are other costs associated with SEO, SaaS Brand has a detailed guide.

All you have to do is paste or enter the URL you wish to promote, add a simple description, select a post category and the number of shares it deserves. The tool will then reach your URL to a diverse and huge audience, thanks to its powerful network.

Babbly has a straightforward interface that’s mobile-friendly, indicating you can grab attention for your content across multiple devices.

8. Headline Analyzer

Writing headlines can be an onerous task if you aren’t a writer. And even if you have years of experience as a writer, headline writing is vastly different from creative or academic writing-or even copywriting in some cases. In short, creating eye-catching headlines can be difficult to get right.

Without an iota of doubt, a killer headline can help you get more shares on social sites.

CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer can you help you create headlines that attract more eyeballs.

You just have to type in your headline and the tool does the rest. It’ll analyze the length of your headline, keywords used, emotional value and many other factors. It’s an easy and quick technique to get a sense of whether your headline will work or not on social media sites.

9. Post Planner

Post Planner is an app that integrates directly into Facebook. The tool allows you to schedule Facebook posts in an effective and easier way. If you purely focus on Facebook to reach out to your audience, Post Planner can be the best tool for you.

Here are some of the most important features of this powerful tool:

Target your audience

One useful feature of Post Planner is the ability to target specific nations while scheduling a post. You can run a promotion for some users or segregate posts by time zone.

Source: quicsprout.com

Post scheduling

Schedule your posts on your Facebook page way ahead of time and do it in bulk.

Trending content

Find a trending content on Facebook on the basis of a keyword and share it knowing that it will become a hit among your followers.

Automate posting

The tool can automatically post fresh content from an RSS feed. It may not necessarily be the best option, but can be useful at times.

10. Socedo

Social media campaigns often have a huge number of mobile pieces, all of which have to work harmoniously if the campaigns are to be a hit.

Whether you are an established social media manager or an entrepreneur, it’s hard to find enough time to manage all of them, especially in the day when you might be looking out for potential customers.

Socedo is a platform for lead generation from social media that does a major portion of the grunt work. It automates lead generation while finding and acquiring targeted leads through various social media channels.

Socedo begins with automated messaging that starts a conversation or drives leads to a landing page, and by integrating the tool with Salesforce, HubSpot and Marketo, you can follow up with every single lead. This way you can focus on increasing ROI without getting bogged down in repetitive and minutiae tasks.

These days new social media management tools can appear like a dime a dozen. Some might turn out to be just another troublesome dashboard, where you login into a few times and then completely forget about it.

Never settle for one that fails to work for you. While there are countless tools and apps that deserve your consideration as feasible solutions to improve your social media investment and presence, the tools mentioned above offer a range of capabilities and costs so as to appeal to everyone from a startup to a full-fledged established firm.

Have you ever used any other social media marketing tool other than the ones mentioned in the list above? Share your favourites and your experiences from your arsenal in the comments section below.